Open Thread: Oracle Hotline

[mithen]

The house is clean, my hands don't hurt (a silver lining to having to clean and not having my typing time), and despite that I still wrote 800 words in 30 minutes last night, which is a blistering pace for me! I'm usually satisfied with 1000 words in an hour... Sadly, another story I was working on got painfully jossed by canon yesterday, so I'm left looking at a bunch of prose I'm very proud of and figuring out if I can somehow trim away the stuff that doesn't work anymore and adapt it... I think I can but it will now end kind of sadly instead of happily, and I'm not thrilled with that either. It's not really something I can just blithely ignore, either, so that's not an option. That's a good question for this week: What's the worst canon has ever interfered with your writing, and how did you deal with it? I hope you're all doing well!

Comments

[me_ya_ri]

Blah, I hate when that happens! As I usually go strongly AU on everything I write (unless it's original of course) I tended to just say 'AU as of X point in canon' and go off on my merry way. Personally I think that's a perfectly valid response to canon twists that don't work with your story. It is, after all, YOUR story. Yes, canon is telling a story and yes, that story is valid. But your story is your own, based off and then branching away from canon as fits your personal vision.

I'm doing really well this week! I'm over 65K on the novel and I've got a short story written that ties directly into it that I'm going to publish (hopefully) today. Won't go live until over the weekend but that's okay. I'm going to do my best to upload it today. I keep thinking I have a bead on how long the book is going to be and I keep being wrong. Now that I'm nearly to 70K it feels like I've got another 20K left to write. We'll see what happens. There's still a healthy amount of mystery and action to work out so it might be 100K by the time I'm done. *rueful sigh*

Such are the joys of writing into the dark, I suppose. Hope you have a great week, sweetie!

[mithen]

The problem with just insisting on it being AU is that, well, it's pro-wrestling fic, and an injury that I was SURE was the character lying about being injured turned out to be the wrestler truly being injured and out for surgery. Which means it's just way too sad for me to be like "NO I'MMA WRITE A VERSION WHERE IT WAS FAKED," knowing that he's really gone for a while... (The dangers of a genre that treads so close to RPF, the real bodies impinge on the storytelling!)

Now that I'm nearly to 70K it feels like I've got another 20K left to write. We'll see what happens. There's still a healthy amount of mystery and action to work out so it might be 100K by the time I'm done. *rueful sigh*

I always get really frustrated with stories like that, the ones that just stretch out to the horizon, receding the closer you get... Still, if it's demanding that much detail that's a really good sign, I think!

[me_ya_ri]

Ah. Well, that does make a difference then. It's actually part of why I avoid anything like RPF. Makes me too uncomfortable. Good luck on the rewriting then!

[prince0froses]

My favorite little one-shot I ever wrote involved Bruce walking between timelines on his way back from the dead in Grant Morrison's continuity where that's a thing that happens. I wrote it before I read the last bit, and of course the last bit didn't go anything like how I wrote it (well, it wouldn't have in the first place because of the shipping overtones I put in my version). I remember a LOT of Avengers fic written just before the first movie got very badly Jossed (literally!) and it's a big reason why I don't find fanfiction interesting anymore, unless it's for video game fandoms because that's all about personal headcanon.

In my original fiction writing, I make the story so it happens less, but there still have been times where the version of a scene in my head is jossed by continuity I had previously planned.

[mithen]

I saw people whose stories got jossed by the latest Avengers movie--jossed by Joss himself, is that an irony or an honor? :) Mmm, I wrote some stuff about Bruce while he was dead (THE LAST TIME IT HAPPENED) that yeah, it was never going to happen, but it was fun to write. *grin*